Imagine that three women, wearing face-masks and armed with automatic weapons, went into the office of a leading pornographic magazine and shot several pornographers dead. Imagine that as they left they were heard to shout ‘men are scum’ and ‘we have avenged the women’. Imagine, in other words, a version of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris where the perpetrators were feminists, and the offence to which they were responding was not the circulation of cartoons depicting the Prophet, but the circulation of images depicting the violent sexual degradation of women.

I do not believe I know a single feminist who would defend such an action. Even committed feminist anti-porn campaigners would deny that violence and killing are legitimate responses to the harm they believe pornography does. ‘Not in my name’, they would say. ‘Feminism is a non-violent political movement, and we condemn these brutal killings’.

But in other ways the feminist response would be different from the response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings. I don’t think we’d be carrying placards saying ‘I am Hustler’, or tweeting messages of support adorned with that hashtag. I don’t think we’d be exalting the freedom of men to make and use pornography as one of the defining features of a civilized society. I don’t think we’d be sharing pornographic images as a tribute to the victims.

I also don’t think we’d be saying, as some people have said about the cartoons that provoked the attack in Paris, ‘they’re only pictures, FFS’. I don’t think we’d be saying that even if the attack had targeted men whose products were not photographs of actual women, but—for instance—the pornographic drawings of girls which are a subgenre of Japanese manga (and are explicit enough to be illegal under the UK’s child pornography laws). Most feminists who oppose pornography do not think its harm is limited to the women actually depicted in it. We think it harms all women, because it influences the way they are looked at, thought about and treated by those who use it.

I am using this imaginary scenario to explain why I have found it difficult to frame a response to the events in Paris. My view on the killings themselves is unambiguous: there is no possible justification for what the killers did. I am also absolutely clear about my opposition to Islamism and other forms of modern religious fundamentalism. These are right-wing political movements and the submission of women to patriarchal authority is a central tenet of all of them. On these points I’m not conflicted, nor at odds with the prevailing view. But my difficulty begins when the conversation turns to the more general issue of freedom of expression.

Before this week I’d never looked at what Charlie Hebdo published, but when I saw the cartoons that were reproduced in the wake of the killings, I found them even more offensive than I’d imagined they would be. I know they belong to a French tradition of overtly and deliberately crude caricature, but even so I was struck, looking at recent covers depicting Muslims, by how much they reminded me of some of the iconography of the Nazis. Take away the turbans, and these malevolent hook-nosed figures could have come from the pages of an anti-semitic pamphlet in 1930s Germany.

Grooming / pimping into heterosexuality:
politics of love part II.

No woman is heterosexual. What men call heterosexuality is an institution where men make women captive for PIV, to control our reproductive functions and steal our labour.

Heterosexuality, or sexuality with men does not exist, because the only relationship to men that exists is men’s violence, physical and mental invasion – one that men have so well crafted and disguised for so long that we can mistake it for attraction, sexual urges or love. All women’s “attraction” to men is 100% eroticised trauma bonding / stockholm syndrome. There is no other form of attraction to men possible than that. None. Any woman “sexually” or “sentimentally” attached to a man is ONLY trauma-bonded to him. This is a universal rule under patriarchy.

[To clarify, I use trauma-bonding and stockholm syndrome (or societal stockholm syndrome) interchangeably. To me it’s the same thing that’s being described, except that I find that the word ‘trauma-bonding’ more accurately defines the context of violence + response to it than a word with “Stockholm” and “syndrome” in it. It’s clear: you bond as a reaction to violence-trauma.]

As a historical note, the term “heterosexuality” only started to be used in the late 19th century by the male psycho contingents and was first coined by a German man apparently (this is in the context of Freudian psychoanalytical backlash against women). It was invented to replace the term “normalsexual” – which was probably too overtly political – and to oppose it to “homosexual”. The men in the psychogenocidal departments invented it for the following purposes:

pathologise lesbianism (and homosexuality) and treat it as a deviance to be cured punished. / pathologise women who resisted PIV and marriage and chose to bond with women instead;

define men’s sexual ownership of women as the norm (= their use of women as dick holes and breeders = rape /impregnation / forced childbearing /abuse);

define men’s sexual ownership of women as a “sexuality” and “sexual orientation” so to hide the violence of it;

naturalise it, that is, define it as a natural biological drive in both men AND women.

If we look at the etymology of the term:

Heteros = different (from the greek).

Sexuality = sexuality.

So the literal meaning of heterosexuality = sexual orientation/ attraction / practice of sexual & love relationship with a member of the opposite sex. Does the word “heterosexuality” define the reality of our relationship to men in patriarchy? Nope. We need to stop using that word and the word “straight” when referring to women occupied by men, because it’s incorrect. I also often see the term “heteronormativity” flying around. This applies only to men. Women are within no norm in the “hetero” world, because we’re not the beneficiary subjects of it, we’re the primary victims and targets of it. !!

Back to where I started. We really need to know and understand how our traumatic responses to men work. I see some feminists wondering why women would still be attracted to men after becoming feminist, why they would stay around to “date” them. They don’t understand why these women would remain “het” if they’ve been able to see how dangerous men are. Not to mention those who believe the only reason women stay with men is for supposed “benefits” – forgetting along the way that forced proximity (captivity) to men + PIV/male violence is THE definition of our oppression and that there is no way we can benefit from it! None at all, ever ever! To believe that, is to believe MEN’S anti-woman lies that oppression is good or natural for us. That we can somehow enjoy it, want it or cope with it. This is a lie; it’s not feminist to believe that, it doesn’t fit our reality at all. Really, this is basic understanding of how men’s violence and brainwashing operate.

Men know how we react to their violence and deliberately manipulate our responses to increase their control over us, and to decrease the efforts it takes them to do so. It’s in men’s interest to disguise their violence as much as possible. It’s not for nothing that modern western patriarchy has perfected “psycho” and “behavioural” (brainwashing and mind-control) sciences for centuries as a powerful anti-women’s liberation tool, and that men rely so heavily on it to keep us at their knees, or rather, below their dicks. It’s part of the global male infrastructure that ensures men a constant supply of ready-tamed and pre-possessed women to effortlessly stick their dicks in, impregnate and abuse. The more it grows, the easier it is for each individual man to break any woman’s will and trick her into PIV and being owned by him – and maintain submission level with the help of men’s institutions.

And so to groom women into “heterosexuality”, the most efficient form of mind-control they found is to traumatise women from birth through parental/family/child (often sexual) abuse – and from then on, use this traumatic memory/PTSD to abuse women without women being aware of it (or of the extent of it). The point is to drive the abuse directly into our unconscious, making it impossible for us to escape it because we’re no longer able to perceive men’s abuse as abusive at the conscious level. In other words, the strategy is to program us to respond to men’s violence through dissociation and trauma-bonding, and cloak/rename these responses as “love” or “attraction” to men – so on the top of it they make us believe we want it.

Let’s recall what trauma-bonding is: if we look at Dee Graham’s work (p.4, Loving to Survive), for a woman to trauma-bond to a man:

she must perceive her captor – the man – as having powers of life and death over her

she must believe that she cannot escape, and that therefore her life depends on her captor

she must be isolated from outsiders so that his perspective is the only perspective available

she must feel as if her captor – the man – showed her some kindness or attention.

This situation of captor-to-hostage is the situation of all women to all men. (This is also the point that D.G. makes in her book). That is, all men hold all women captive. All women are prisoners and hostages to men’s world. Men’s world is like a vast prison or concentration camp for women. This isn’t a metaphor, it’s reality. Each man is a threat. We can’t escape men. We are forced to depend on men and male infrastructures for our survival. Men’s perspective (and men’s language that names their perspective) is the only perspective available and we are isolated from other women and woman-centred perspectives. Not all men rape / abuse us at all times – a man just being polite might cause us to feel grateful and t-b.

So just by looking at the reality of men’s domination of women, it holds that emotional or sexual attachment to men can always only be trauma-bonding, because for it not tobe trauma-bonding, men would have to not be our oppressors. But there’s more to this than what Dee Graham says, so I’m building on her theory here.

The reason so many of us trauma-bond so instantly and intensely to men in our proximity and sometimes to just any man that crosses our way, whether we are lesbian, celibate, separatist or “het”, is that we are programmed and groomed to react in this way to male threat since birth. The key to understanding this is dissociation, since trauma-bonding is a form of dissociation; so before I continue into the female child-grooming theory i’ll explain what I mean by dissociation and why trauma-bonding is a form of dissociation. Sorry if it’s a bit long but I have yet to find a shorter way of explaining it.

Dissociation is a normal survival reaction to intentional, human(male) violence. The condition for dissociation is when we perceive we can’t escape the violence, and are “frozen” on the spot. Most if not all men’s violence against women fits this criteria, because it takes place within a context of captivity to men. The closer and more dependent on the abuser we are, the more we will have to dissociate, especially at young age, especially if the abuse is ongoing. Also, the more the violence is socially hidden, unnamed, denied or renamed as something else, the more likely we are to dissociate from it, because we can’t connect our response to the situation (we feel bad but can’t perceive the violence as violence). This is a mindfuck which causes freeze fright, and dissociation.

Dissociation is when, in a situation of being trapped in violence, the brain creates a neuronal short-circuit so we don’t die of stress. Stress/fear is a normal reaction to an endangering, unsafe situation and means that adrenalin and cortisol gets sent to the heart and brain to react fast, think fast and get away fast. If we can’t make sense of the danger and get away from it, the brain shuts everything down to stop the emergency reaction from continuing (the sending of adrenalin + cortisol) because otherwise it could intoxicate our body and we can die from it. The brain then sends some other drugs (close to endorphin and Ketamine) to create an amnesia or blank in the mind, and to numb the pain. This is dissociation. Other ways of sending these dissociative drugs than directly from the brain is through genital arousal, trauma-bonding, or by taking external drugs such as alcohol or other anaesthetisers. Dissociation is what causes the traumatic memory, that is, unconscious memory of the violence which remains stuck in the lymphatic system (short-term memory place) because of the short-circuit – it couldn’t connect to the other parts of the brain anymore to get into the long-term memory, where we store our experiences and can learn from them. The memory never being processed, it comes back to us in invasive ways – either through flashes, dreams, sensations, or in more cryptic ways such as with somatic disorders, re-enacting similar trauma with other people, etc.

So yes, dissociation works like a DRUG, whether as an internal biological/chemical function or with the help of external products, when the internal one is no longer strong enough to numb the pain. This means that we may become addicted to the dissociation, and therefore the violence that triggers the dissociative state might become addictive too. And men make sure that the only available activities for women are violent and dissociative: from PIV to mutilating “femininity” practices to social binge drinking to traumatic relationships or workaholism, etc.

When we think of dissociation we imagine extreme torture and then feeling outside of our body, or feeling high: even if it can be that, very often it may be as simple as having a blank in the mind after seeing a misogynist advert, or forgetting the conversation you were having as you saw a man sexually harass his “girlfriend”, or feeling aroused when you come across a man that looks like the one you’ve previously trauma-bonded to / or who previously abused you, or having the urge to drink a glass of beer after some men insulted you (just to give some random examples). Because men’s violence is present in our everyday lives, so is dissociation, but most often we don’t realise how disconnected we are until we reconnect again some way or another and become more aware of the violence.

Now to heterosexuality and dissociation. Relationships with men or any sexual intention from their part is, when not repulsive and making you want to run away – necessarily dissociative and trauma-bonding. That’s because of the combined violence/perceived niceness inherent in “heterosexuality” (+ points 1, 2 and 3 from Grahams’s conditions for stockholm syndrome).

To trauma-bond, on top of everything D.G said, there needs to be actual violence or threat of violence, not just the perception of it. Our perceptions and responses never trick us, we only trauma-bond to people who represent a real threat or within an unequal, unsafe setting. Being around any man constitutes a threat to us, because they are our oppressors. Being wanted by a man and him treating you as if you were his is inherently violent. That’s anything from him showing he wants you, “dating” with you, being in a relationship or married to him. In either case, it consists in some kind of physical or mental violation from his part, on top of the constant threat of PIV/rape he represents as a man, whether he decides to enforce it or not.

Second, men brainwash women into believing that a man wanting us is positive attention. Worse, we are persuaded that we can’t EXIST, be happy and whole if a man doesn’t want us. They conduct heavy brainwashing on girls and women to force the perspective that PIV isn’t rape but “sex”, that sexual harassment is “seduction”, “courting” and men owning us is “love”, “romance”. We are to actively seek men to want us and this should be at the centre of all our worries and activities. And no matter how violent he is when he wants us, it means he likes me. We should be grateful.

Because of this, anything within “heterosexuality” from men merely being polite in our presence to “dating”, to buying us a drink to regular PIV/rape to brutally attacking us may cause a similar reaction of trauma-bonding (depending on how groomed to it we are in the first place) because if he wants us, it means positive attention. And a man “liking us” means EXISTING, being saved, rescued from non-existence or near death. And so we may feel grateful for that attention even if it was horrendous, horribly destructive – we may go back to him because we feel guilty not to show our gratitude for that attention. We feel obligated to thank him. We are left to blame ourselves for the awfulness of the experience, because there is no other explanation available to us. It’s our fault if it felt wrong, we just chose the wrong guy, we’re not liberated enough to enjoy it, we didn’t do enough to please him, etc.

This means that male sexualised invasion (heterosexuality) is essentially a mindfuck. The violent/nice aspect of it is inherent to heterosexuality. What’s perceived as nice IS the act of invasion itself, there is no separation between the perceived acts of niceness and the violence here. So if we’re made dependent on male sexual violence, perceived as positive attention, it is experienced only through a dissociated state. We can’t experience the violence on a conscious level because we can’t see why it makes us feel awful despite the “love/attraction” (Trauma-b.). We know we feel bad but we can’t connect it to the situation because it can only mean positive attention. And there is nothing, nobody to confirm the reality of this violence. We can only deny, suppress our responses and dissociate from it – and blame ourselves for feeling bad. It’s a mindfuck because it’s a paradox: the thing we are told is supposed to do most good to us, what we are supposed to cling on for life and seek forever, is exactly what does most harm to us. On one hand our existence is made to depend on being wanted by a man, but on the other our existence is endangered by being around with this man. If we can’t make sense of it, we stay trapped, freeze fright, and trauma-bond to the man.

So because of this nice/violent mindfuck nature of male sexual invasion (heterosexuality), dissociation is almost automatic, and it takes the form of trauma-bonding. We flip to this TB state in men’s presence all the more automatically if we were “drugged” on it for years, especially if we had lots of PIV/rape that caused genital arousal, which increases the intensity of TB tenfold (the intensity of TB and dissociation is always proportionate to the violence). It intoxicates us and we immediately lose our senses, it’s like being driven outside of our body. It’s like being an empty shell filled up by him, clinging on to him even if he’s a bastard. It instantly creates a state of melancholia because we’re driven outside of ourselves, but because we’re colonised by the guy we think it’s because we’re missing HIM. In fact we’re missing ourself and it feels very painful, like you’re being eaten up from the inside. This is the ongoing genocide of women by men. Even though they kill many of us, they need us alive and tied to them so they can keep using for PIV/reproduction, so what they do is kill us from the inside as much as they possibly can, drive us outside of our bodies, into exile from ourselves.

This automatic trauma-bonding reaction to men that we might mistake for sexual urges or falling in love is one of the main reasons separatism from men is so important. As long as men are our oppressors and probably as long as they have dicks, they will be a threat so the only way to prevent TB from happening is to avoid any close contact with men. if we TB, it’s not in our control, especially if we were heavily “drugged” on TB / PIV before. Choosing to be only around with women isn’t a special identity or a VIP radfem status that other lesser feminists have to attain, it’s a matter of protection. Even after several years of not interacting with men any more and choosing to love only women, I still get invasive flashes and dreams of PIV/rape, and I still TB to men if I can’t avoid them and they’re “friendly”. I hope it will dissipate more over time though.

The reason we may switch to TB to men so quickly in the first place though, instead of other forms of dissociation or being horrified by what boys and men are and avoiding them like the plague, is really because men program us to react in that way to abuse from since we are born, and by the time we’re grown up, this mechanism becomes like a second skin. TB to parents/fathers, more than any other form of dissociation, is the primary template to which we are raised as girls, which men then build on to abuse us as adult women. It would be completely impossible for men to subordinate us the way they do without parental/men’s abuse of girls.

now please enjoy my super diagram on child grooming!

Some notes on the diagram: the centre of the circle is the core, bare minimum of child abuse inherent in the patriarchal “family”. IOW the conditions in which women give birth to girls are inherently abusive in patriarchy. We are owned by a woman who’s owned and abused herself by a man.

Basically with girls we have the same configuration, the same paradox as with heterosexuality where the very people who we’re emotionally and physically dependent on to survive are those who are endangering our life, attacking our integrity through treating us as possessions, lack of care, neglect and abuse. We can’t escape our parents: abandonment effectively means death. We are terrorised of being further harmed or abandoned.

Because there is no way as a baby, infant or child to make sense of this mindfuck violence as the reality of it is never named or confirmed, as we are utterly alone with our suffering and powerless in this situation, our instinctual reaction is to trauma-bond to our parents and blame ourselves for their mistreatment. We think that if they don’t take care of me or treat me badly, it’s because they don’t like me, because I’m bad, I’m not lovable, I’m a stain, I’m disposable, I’m a monster inside, I’m not worth being loved and protected, I’m a bad girl.Winning our parents’ approval and pleasing them, desperately wanting to be “loved” by them and dissociating from the neglect or abuse is a survival reaction.

This abusive captivity to owners (parents) is called family and love, and we are supposed to be forever grateful to our parents.

To this captivity/trauma-bonding we add patriarchal “education”, often administered from birth, which consists in suppressing in the child any expressions of anger, distress (which is always justified) or individual will, through punishments and rewards. If a child cries or screams, to express normal needs or protest her condition, she has to be “corrected” by being shouted at, scorned, finger wagged, put in a corner or beaten. She might also be rewarded by attention or good marks for being obedient. Then adults deny us the right to express any anger or resistance to this treatment, because “it’s for our own good”. This is the slow but steady grooming to dissociate from violence – being punished for reacting to the violence, and the reality of the violence being constantly denied, we learn to suppress our normal responses to abuse and our capacity to defend ourselves from it. We learn to fragment our minds and experience the ongoing violence only on an unconscious level, to survive. The more extreme the violence, as in with severe psychological, sexual or physical abuse, the more we live in dissociation.

To this, of course, we add steady grooming to sexually service men and brainwashing into PIV, constant sexual harassment and abuse from men in general, mutilating femininity practices and general hatred of females.

This is the template on which grooming to heterosexuality is fixed. I think the reason we can so easily switch to trauma-bonding to men, experience men’s approval as such a matter of life or death, perceive that our self-worth is so dependent on somebody else’s external attention even if they are repugnant oafs, is because this is how we learned to live and survive as a child, from birth. Then we simply continue to adapt in this way to male violence as we grow, we know no other way to react to abuse. The system of captivity to parents is the same as with male ownership / relationships to men. Same isolation, same captivity, same need to dissociate / TB from ongoing abuse, etc. There’s no way we would dissociate so easily from men’s abuse were it not for this treatment as girls. There’s no way we would go near men at all.

So, all these words to explain in every way possible that heterosexuality doesn’t exist and our “urges” to bond with them emotionally or sexually aren’t natural drives but normal PTSD reactions to years of abuse and mind-programming.

Men lie about everything. Or in other words, they do the most atrocious and disgusting things to us, and call it something else, for instance they call it love.

When I was really young I always wondered what it meant to “be in love”. It was painted everywhere as the “must” thing to experience for a woman, the thing you had to experience to be fulfilled. It was always depicted as some super special state that struck you like lightening and transcended you and changed the way you behaved. Quite frightening when you think of it. I never “fell” in love with anybody when I was young, and was always wondering whether I was normal or not. I’d tell people in a moany way, “i’ve never fallen in love”, and they would say to me “ah, you’ll see, it’ll come one day when you’re not expecting it”. It felt exactly the same way when people explained to me what god and faith was and apparently I was supposed be transcended by this super feeling during the rituals in mass or something, except that I never felt anything and it all was completely artificial and deadening at best, having to pretend, and feeling guilty about pretending, just like coupledom.

I remember a boy approaching me when I was 9 or so and he wanted to “go out with me”. We were supposed to hold hands and it felt utterly odd and fake (what was the difference between “being with him” and “not being with him”? The blandness and unnaturalness of it was pretty mortifying), I didn’t feel anything except unconformable about having to hold hands just to show the world that I belonged to him, which I didn’t like because I thought it was wrong to belong to someone, but I also felt guilty for not feeling that special love state that I was meant to feel, I thought it meant I was heartless.

Anyway, a few rapes / PIV / abusive relationships later, as I was still adolescent, I “fell in love”, or so I thought. All I knew was that it was very intense, so I assumed THAT must be love! FINALLY!!

now, what exactly was it that I felt? My responses to first being “seduced” (chased) and kissed (physically invaded and held captive) by a man – and him wanting to see me again – included:

blank in the mind

not knowing what to say or do

my heart racing

sweating

obsessive, invasive thoughts about him to the extent that it would prevent me from concentrating on other things or experiencing other things fully

spending hours or a long time preparing what I would say to him before i’d see him

nervousness

insomnia

those so-called “butterflies” in the stomach, that is, stomach tensions

blushing

checking myself in the mirror and controlling my body appearance more obsessively than I would normally do, and being more afraid than usual of being ugly, not intelligent enough, or whatever

Desperate waiting of signs of contact from his part. An email, a text, a phone call… checking my phone and emails obsessively and my heart dropping when nothing would come.

A painful feeling of loss, separation, emptiness (that is, feeling empty, non-existent without his presence) and even of being ripped apart inside the chest. A sensation that would intensify in his absence or if he would be sadistically cold or distant, or after PIV or physical invasion.

A constant state of scorching melancholia, varying in intensity. It is a state in which you are trapped between a perceived nothingness out there and the horror of your own solitude / emptyness in there (or what you are made to believe is solitude of the soul) so i’d drift melancholically outside of my body, begging silently to hook myself onto him (or someone else).

Finding beautiful things in the man where there weren’t any.

Yeah. Nothing in here is love. It’s just terror of being abandoned, and terror full stop. Or what we call trauma-bonding. Yet everywhere these very normal responses to harm, neglect and captivity by men are described as love, even when the woman (say in a “romantic” novel) DIES from this supposed love. And this isn’t just projection, in every case the abuse and threat by men in relationships is real, because PIV, because men are our oppressors and captors and we fear them, because the compulsory physical invasion that men define as sex, the real neglect, lies and manipulation, etc.

Needless to say, this first experience was extremely painful. The guy was something like 13 years older than me, I was still a minor, and my “love” to him would be all the more strong that he was very fleeting, would contact me only every now and then when he needed to fuck (rape) me. I was too grateful for him paying any attention to me to be even aware of his abusive behaviour, or understand what it meant. I was confused that he only wanted to see me sporadically, instead of starting a relationship, which is the way in which this love is supposed to be expressed. If he liked me enough to “desire” me, why didn’t he want a relationship? Not knowing whether he “loved” me or not made me constantly anxious. The emotional distance, neglect and constant waiting for him made the pain acute.

Fast forward a year, I finally realised that he’d used me and had no respect for me. I decided to give up on hoping that he’d “fall in love” (= get into the promised relationship). The instant i’d done that, I felt such an amazing sense of freedom. It felt like all the weight of the world had suddenly disappeared!! I wasn’t tied, bonded to him anymore. I was independent. I didn’t have to live my entire life according to him, waiting and yearning for him. The illusions suddenly fell apart and I saw him as some useless guy. I told myself: never again will I be so naïve with a man! I was unlucky I thought, and I should just have picked a better man, and been more careful.

The problem was, that over the next five or six years, this pattern kept repeating and repeating and repeating itself. Every man I trauma-bonded to either was only interested in using me for PIV (rape) or had no interest in me at all. I thought something was wrong with me, maybe I wasn’t pretty enough, skinny enough, boobed enough, outward going enough, mature, seductive, whatever. I couldn’t get it what it was that I lacked. I didn’t understand why I accumulated so many failures. Why did they never stay? Why was I so unlucky in “love”? Alternatively, I wouldn’t trauma-bond but then i’d be fully aware that I didn’t want the PIV and physical invasion (when I wasn’t so much aware of it with the others, because of the trauma-bonding) and it would be even more humiliating. I was still too grateful for the attention though to ward them off, so it would be painfully disgusting and i’d hate myself for what I perceived was self-betrayal.

When I was “attracted” they didn’t want, but when I didn’t want, they wanted. It didn’t make sense.

I did see there was a pattern and tried things to avoid being in such pain. I decided I would stop having PIV with men I didn’t know well or hadn’t started an official relationship with. The aim was to hold off PIV with men who were “attracted” to me until I had gotten to know them and knew they wouldn’t use / abuse me just for PIV, and would want a serious, committed and equal relationship, based on mutual discovery, friendship, etc. At least if I “fell in love” with them, they wouldn’t have fucked me, I thought. Well guess what, all that happened was that I continued to trauma-bond to men, except that after them “being attracted” to me (inviting me for drinks, or whatever) they would just lose interest in me because they couldn’t get out of me what they wanted, and they’d find another woman that was more compliant sooner or later. That was painful too. And it didn’t stop some men to rape me anyway.

Because all this was still so confusing and painful, I would think about it a lot, and ask a lot of questions to others, to see what were other’s experiences. The things that I began to figure out, bit by bit, were:

That the intensity of the trauma-bond could wither away after some time of knowing the man as a friend or acquaintance.

That the “love” in question had nothing to do with the men’s individual character or the fact that I appreciated them for what they were, but all to do with what they represented to me – usually a figure of authority, being much older than me, or having a higher status. It would actually prevent me from seeing them for what they were (lying rapey shitbags). The more distant or cold they were, whether or not they had decided to physically invade me, the more painful the “love” (trauma-bonding) would be.

Also, I acknowledged to myself that this “love” feeling was too intense to bear and never led me anywhere except desolation. It wasn’t natural and was a sign that the relationship was unhealthy. I assumed that there must be a problem in the way I loved, that if it were really love it couldn’t possibly be so painful and alienating. So I started to seek out why this happened to me and to break the pattern in some way. I began to pay close attention to how it worked and what it did to me.

I decided to stop seeking to be in a “love relationship” with a man until I had sorted myself out, and also to seek men with whom I could be equal in age and status to prevent trauma-bonding. I told myself “your’e not going out with a man until you know you can “love” without being in pain.” If I were going to feel love, it would have to be a feeling of calm and serenity, of wholeness and happiness, and there should be absolutely no fear, dread of loss, anxiety or anything like that towards the man, otherwise it would mean that it wasn’t love but trauma-bonding or S/M and I should stay away from the guy, or wait until it withered away to make an informed decision. Seduction in itself was wrong, artificial and alienating, because it was treating me like something to be owned so if I was to have a physical relationship with a man, it would have to be after some time of friendship and closeness, and come “naturally”.

Soon after, I observed that constantly and secretly hoping for a love relationship to happen wherever I would go was painful in an of itself because I would always end up with a feeling of loneliness, dissatisfaction, like something special wasn’t happening – in a state of expectation of something external happening to me rather than self-centredness. It construed myself as inherently alone and empty, as being only a half of a person in the need of being filled by a man (or another person). As inherently lacking and not whole. As if I couldn’t bear being with myself, I had to disappear in a man / coupledom to “exist” – this is extremely woman-hating and annihilating of self. Waiting to depend on him and wait for him to receive love, and of course it would never come. I finally saw the utter reversal and lie of all this shite. I realised I had to give up the very desire to be in a relationship so not to feel constantly alienated. I remember very well making this decision and felt such a sense of freedom and happiness to be with myself after that. It felt like a reconciliation.

From then on things unfolded pretty fast. This is when feminism seriously kicked in, when I realised PIV, sexualised physical invasion of women and control of our reproductive organs were how men oppressed and harmed us. That PIV was inherently harmful, humiliating and that we weren’t meant to be penetrated. And where I understood the general structure of male violence and patriarchy. My whole world blew apart.

Well, guess what, all of a sudden men weren’t interested in me at all. Because I’d always stay away from any kind of “seduction” before I’d get to know the guy well, they’d simply steer off from me very soon, before I could even get to know them in fact. Har har. This was an eye-opener. It made me see that men weren’t interested in equal relationships at all with women. None of them. There were no “nice guys” or exceptions. They weren’t interested in me, not even as friends, because they couldn’t make out of me what they wanted. All they wanted was to be able to use me as a PIV-socket and as their property, because that was my function as a woman in male land, and if I didn’t fulfil that function, I was of no interest to them.

And after setting some final rules for interacting with men, to protect myself from their disgusting women-hatred (complete openness to feminism, not the slightest hint of misogyny, capable of conversing about it without the slightest defensiveness or making me feel awkward in any way), men just disappeared from my life. Not one ever fit to the criteria, even though my rules weren’t very radical and were individualistic.

I saw that however much individual effort I’d put in a relation with a man, even without PIV or outside of “seduction”, it would always be unequal with them, because they are our oppressors and captors, and they feed off our energy and us trying to change them. There would never be complete protection from trauma-bonding to them, or fear of their violence, or from being prevented to go the end of my thoughts. It didn’t matter what they did individually to be nice or not, it’s what they are and represent as a male class. Even to this day if a man is kind to me or just smiles I can still feel this “attraction” and gratefulness that I’d feel before and tried to get rid of, which simply means that men are still our captors and there’s no way we can completely get away from stockholm syndrome so long as they hold us captive. Which is precisely why I know I have to stay away from them as much as I can.

So yes, the end of peeling down men’s lies about love and coupledom was the beginning of separatism from men, and the beginning of radical feminism!

Where your gag comes from.

Apparently, for some people (usually white in my experience**), it’s difficult for them to comprehend the perspective that BDSM kink culture is neck-deep in racism and misogyny, particularly in the sexualization of racist-misogynistic historical practices. It’s become quite clear to me over months of pointing out the eerie similarities between the master/slave dynamic that’s common place in bondage subculture and the master/slave dynamic that was quite vividly practiced through patriarchal gender roles between men and women, as well as slavery…that many people struggle with being able to draw parallels between the techniques of torture slaves were subjected to and the methods of punishment “subs” are subjected to in kink culture. From the whipping to the gags.

It’s been communicated to me, based on the hesitant and confused reception of this argument, that I’m going to need to get visual. This post will include illustrations and imagery that may be potentially disturbing to some viewers, as well as triggering to people who feel mentally disarmed by images of black slavery and female oppression. This will not be my final post on the topic, but it will be an introduction to much larger, much more elaborate posts addressing the racist-patriarchal narratives usually replicated in kink culture (this does not exclude femdom kink practices, which I’ll be writing about in future posts).

I’ll first like to point out the gag. A torture device used to stop, “Negro Heads, with punishments for Intoxication and dirt-eating.”

…was used to punish “drunkenness in females,” and the mask on it functions as a “punishment and preventative of….dirt eating.”

In some cases, along with the gags, “…a flat iron goes into the mouth, and so effectually keeps down the tongue, that nothing can be swallowed, not even the saliva, a passage for which is made through holes in the mouth-plate…when long worn, [it] becomes so heated as frequently to bring off the skin along with it.” – US Slave: Slave Tortures: The Mask, Scold’s Bridle or Brank. (NB : toutes les photos de femmes « blanches » reproduites sur cette page sont des photos qui érotisent et déréalisent la torture, car elles sont des photos de films, donc faites pour mentir sur la souffrance des femmes. Ce choix éditorial est pour le moins misogyne).

Here’s another illustration of a tin mask sometimes used by Brazilian slave masters for reasons documented as to stop, “…[slaves] who were prone to eat earth or dirt to wear…”

A scold was defined as: “A troublesome and angry woman who by brawling and wrangling amongst her neighbours breaks the public peace, increases discord and becomes a public nuisance to the neighbourhood.” The device was a locking iron muzzle, metal mask or cage which encased the head. There was an iron curb projecting into the mouth which rested on the top of the tongue. This device prevented the shrew from speaking. In some instances the iron curb was studded with spikes which inflicted pain if the victim spoke. Some branks had a bell built in which drew attention to the scold as she walked through the streets. The woman would be humiliated by the jeering and comments from other people.

THE SCOLD’S BRIDLE

[Scold’s Bridle: This was a metal frame place over a woman’s head. It had a bit that stuck in her mouth to prevent her talking. The scold’s bridle or branks was used in Scotland by the 16th century and was used in England from the 17th century. It was last used in Britain in 1824].

Made by blacksmiths, the bridle was a cage-like device, made from iron. It was approximately nine inches high and seven inches wide, and was fitted to the woman’s head. The most basic type was made of a band of iron, which was hinged at the side and had a protruding part, or tongue piece, that could be flat or with a spike, which went into the woman’s mouth, to hold her tongue down. Another band of iron went over her head, the front of which was shaped for her nose to go through. Depending on the design, the bridle could be uncomfortable, painful or torturous, and scarring of the tongue was not uncommon. Some had a bell secured to a spring, which was attached to the bridle, so the wearer could be heard as she approached.

Some houses had a hook in the wall at the side of the fireplace where the wife would be chained, until she promised to behave herself and curb her tongue. Although sometimes fitted to a nagging wife by the local gaoler (jailer) at the request of her husband, or by the husband himself, it was more often a punitive sentence ordered by a magistrate. Judicial bridles were more elaborate than the basic type; they always had at least one spike and they could be locked. They also had a chain attached to the side of the bridle, with a ring on the end. This could be used to publicly humiliate the woman by leading her through the town, or staking her at a designated area for a set time period. The amount of time the bridle was worn could be from 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the seriousness of the offense, during which time the miscreant would not be able to eat or drink. It was also said to be used on witches to prevent them from chanting or casting spells.

It’s pretty evident that when some women, especially women of color , argue that BDSM kink culture has an overwhelming amount of racist-misogyny embedded in its practice of reenacting bondage and inequitable dynamics, they have a reasonable argument worth considering. It’s not difficult to understand the viewpoint that some kinks take things steeped in the actual subordination and oppression of people and turn it into a sexualized drama that’s just “fun and games,” for the (hopefully consensual) participants involved.